Zimbabweans need help in SA, not mass deportations
FreeAfrica (July 24, 2003)
By: Thabo Siziba

It is an alarming fact and just as appalling that of all foreign governments receiving fleeing Zimbabwean refugees, South Africa stands out targeting these victims brutal displacement and oppression for deportation.

Recent reports have indicated that at least more than 51000 Zimbabweans identified as illegal immigrants by South African authorities were deported back to Zimbabwe between January and June 2006. Presently the South African government claims to be deporting at least 265 Zimbabwean immigrants a day. In 2005, 97433 Zimbabweans were deported compared with 72112 in 2004.

The South African Home Affairs Ministry has recently been under fire for refusing to acknowledge the “real threat to life that the Zimbabwean administration has become to its own citizens” and also the well-founded fear of persecution that opponents and critics of Zimbabwe’s illegitimate government face. This strategic policy of quite diplomacy to Zimbabwe by South Africa’s government remains a serious betrayal to both countries’ majority populations. Many of South Africa’s own renowned activists and other non-governmental bodies including clergy have denounced South Africa’s policies on Zimbabwe, yet that government seems unshaken. Many times instead, the South African authorities have publicly condoned Zimbabwe’s political misrule as internal matters that only the people of Zimbabwe themselves should deal with; saying this, while they continuously aide Zimbabwe’s brutal authorities and extend gestures of gratitude, friendship and trust.

Probably one should find it ironical indeed that while South Africa is still so well known for its notorious aiding and abetting policies to Zimbabwe’s regime, it is the world’s largest recipient of Zimbabweans fleeing. Statistics have indicated that as many as between 3 and 4million Zimbabweans citizens have fled to South Africa. One would ask what Zimbabweans want in South African when infact their deportation back to Zimbabwe seems so obvious. Well, first and foremost South Africa is an economically successful neighbor of Zimbabwe. This fact has made South Africa get away with efforts to classify Zimbabwean political refugees as economic refugees or what one would simply interpret to mean “economic opportunists”. South Africa sees all the brutality that is perpetrated by the Zimbabwean regime upon its people and is enjoying the spectator seat. How long this conduct of unethical partnership between South Africa’s government and Zimbabwe’s illegitimate government will last is yet to be seen. Many Zimbabweans sacrificed their lives in the quest for a free and democratic South Africa, and yet today when the tables turn around South Africa sees Zimbabweans’ plight as a quest to topple a government South Africa loves and admires.

Instead of engaging in terms of stopping the brutality of Zimbabwe’s Zanu PF regime and helping find ways of encouraging well revived leadership in this dying country, South Africa’s authorities have preferred to engage in designing new means and methods of sustaining their mass exodus of Zimbabweans back to Zimbabwe where suffering and persecution by the State’s secret agents remains real. So real that because of the apparent deportations by South Africa, many of Zimbabwe’s victims now prefer to suffer in silence just so that in case one is returned home, one is not the first to be hunted down by the State secret gents. This is the kind of fear that all Zimbabweans around the world suffer the most when faced with uncertainty in trying to seek refuge in another country. The South African government is said to be now considering building a second detention center near Beit-Bridge, to help cope with overcrowding experienced at the notorious Lindela Detention Center. The notorious Lindela detention center outside Krugersdorp, west of Johannesburg, keeps foreigners due for deportation. Lindela is well known for its unscrupulously corrupt and bribe hungry authorities. It has also been known to be a haven of infectious diseases caused by overcrowding and poor holding conditions.

South Africa’s government is reported to have indicated that the proposed detention center has already been discussed with the Zimbabwean ‘government’, although department spokesman Nkosana Sibuyi indicated that a final decision had not yet been made. Home Affairs officials are also negotiating with Zimbabwe to allow the deportation trains to enter the country. At the moment, Zimbabwean deportees are offloaded at Beit Bridge. On being deported, most of the deportees quickly find their way back into South Africa through makeshift entry points along the crocodile-infested Limpopo River.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which has been dealing with the handling of deportees from South Africa has since established a support center for the deportees near Beit Bridge. At the center they are offered food, shelter and transport to their homes. Nick van der Vyver, head of the IOM at Beit Bridge, said his organisation received a total of 16394 deportees in a period of six weeks.

Rather than see such increase in Zimbabweans’ deportations as a need for concern about Zimbabwe’s regime, another perception also given by some uninformed analysts suggests that these deportations only show a rise in the number of illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe.

Van der Vyver said 92% of those deported from South Africa were men. He said that in one week at the beginning of this month his organisation had received 35 Zimbabwean children who had apparently been abandoned by their parents at the border. The children had been referred to social services in Zimbabwe. Dr Sally Peberdy, project manager of the Southern African Migration Project at Wits University, is reported to have said the deportations showed that there was an increase in the number of Zimbabweans in South Africa illegally. This, an obscured view coming from a respected scholar.

Whatever happened to the 1951 Geneva Convention for Refugees? Zimbabweans have a Right, even under international Conventions that South Africa itself is a signatory to, such as that of 1951, to flee persecution from Zimbabwe, and south Africa needs to begin respecting that Right in retrospect to its own history.

Deportations of Zimbabwean refugees needs to stop in South Africa, just as such a policy has been adopted by many western governments fearing for the lives and future of Zimbabwean citizens.

Its is interesting to know that it is largely in Africa that Zimbabwe’s regime enjoys support for its terrorism likened acts against its own citizens. Acts such as killing and starving opponents and critics, segregating opposition strongholds from government funding and forms of development, refusing international aid and instilling continuous fear to silence people through various means of communications, including well instructed media outlets.

South Africa needs to wake up to the real plight of Zimbabweans, just as Zimbabweans woke up to their plight and fought side by side with the South Africans for them to achieve their freedom and democracy; free racial segregation and oppression.

Africa needs to begin being accountable for its own acts. Playing the “victim card” must be denounced amongst our African leaders. While realizing that many of today’s African leaders may have fought side by side, nation with nation against colonial rule, that will never justify the need for any fellow African leader to condone or ignore gross human rights violations by another upon innocent citizens. Democracy should be democracy, in Africa, and freedom should be freedom. Freedom and democracy in Africa should not be left to be defined by leaders, every person of every country should be able to define for themselves what freedom is and what democracy is and every person has an equal right to enjoy such pleasures.